Bringing Up Father — buf390722

Six horizontal panels show a formal dinner party in full swing. A nobleman flatters a curly-haired young woman while her beau—slack-jawed and gap-toothed—mumbles "Goof-goof-gaw" beside her. Parents beam on both sides; a servant at far right confesses the chef drank all the wine. George McManus's strip, launched in 1913, followed Irish immigrant Jiggs and his social-climbing wife Maggie through decades of domestic comedy. McManus's draftsmanship is distinctive: Art Nouveau flourishes on chandeliers and wallpaper, ink-confident figures, and speech balloons that crowd every panel with overlapping boast and blunder. *Bringing Up Father* ran in hundreds of papers worldwide and belongs to the founding generation of newspaper comics—the syndicated daily and Sunday pages whose panel-and-balloon grammar directly seeded the first collected comic books of the 1930s.